Attendees from business, civil society, social entrepreneurs and academia brought multi-stakeholder views to the lively debate. Online tools were used to engage with E-Leaders attending the meeting remotely, and Twitter allowed a wider community to join the discussion.

The discussion covered all aspects of e-government and the challenges facing E-Leaders as a result of rising economic and fiscal, social and digital governance pressures.

Three key themes emerged from the meeting

Take steps to defragment government. Ministries are mostly structured historically to solve domain specific problems; ICTs and better information flow across organisational boundaries can help improve co-ordination and collaboration to achieve better results.

Improve government agility to meet expectations. Ministers and the public expect "always-on" and more responsive governments; the Internet, mobile technologies, social media and cloud computing can help achieve greater agility.

Promote open data to open governments. The "governance deficit" being experienced by many OECD countries places pressures on citizens’ trust in government. Open Data is a critical foundation for increased transparency, inclusion and empowerment of stakeholders, and to build a better evidence base for policy making.

The meeting proposed a mandate for the OECD to conduct exploratory work on digital governance, and develop a policy instrument on e-government. A task force of E-Leaders will work with, and support, the OECD to advance this ambitious agenda.

The work in the months ahead will cover two broad domains:

How to increase cost-efficiency, effectiveness and relevance - how do we best use ICTs to do things better within government?

Towards digital governance - how do we more effectively achieve public policy goals and interact with wider policy communities?

E-Leaders concluded that this e-government policy instrument will support them in their role to strengthen the strategic agility of the public sector.